


Which Conception Lags Behind

by templefugate



Category: Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Abandon All Hope of Avoiding Spoilers Ye Who Enter Here, Angst, Anxiety, Child Abandonment, Everyone Has Issues, Gen, Post-Canon, Prison, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22080931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/templefugate/pseuds/templefugate
Summary: Rose is forced to leave the not-quite comfortable routine of his captivity in order to confront the boy he forgot.
Relationships: Beet | Bede & Poplar | Opal, Beet | Bede & Rose | Chairman Rose
Comments: 2
Kudos: 86





	Which Conception Lags Behind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RatMonarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RatMonarch/gifts).



> This is dedicated to Ash for enabling the bullshit I'm back on.

How long had it been since Rose had last gotten up before ten in the morning? Even with his morning coffee (black like always – acquired taste or not, it was easier than measuring out creamer every day) to jump start his system, the answer eluded him. He ran a hand through his hair, still damp from his earlier shower, and took another sip of his coffee. A plate of toast sat on his small coffee table, atop a pile of half-finished books. His eyes darted from the pool of slowly melting butter on its surface to the wall. Between sips of his coffee, his stomach was performing a gymnastics routine. Just one bite of it might be enough to cause his previous night’s dinner to decorate the carpet.

Not that it really mattered whether he ate or not. His three meals a day were never particularly memorable, but they kept his cholesterol low and his trousers size constant. Skipping breakfast would be an aberration, but in a way his whole day was one.

_A visitor._

He mulled the words over in his mind. He’d spent the better half of the past two days scribbling down names of who they might be. Leon had at times been at the top of the list. Other times he had scratched the name out until his pen ripped through the paper. If Oleana hadn’t been in custody as well, no doubt in an arrangement much like his own, then she would have been at the top of his list. There were the gym leaders to consider, but besides Raihan he’d barely ever spoken to the others. That had been Oleana’s business. Still, there was a possibility that one of them might come.

Possibilities… His world was at once constricted yet free of regimen. His mind could move in every direction while his body could only pace between the large central living area to his closet-sized bedroom and claustrophobe’s nightmare of a bathroom. While he wasn’t dressed in orange or staring at a row of bars – a benefit of once owning the prison, he supposed – the light blue walls without windows that surrounded him seemed to get smaller with every day.

Other than a large metal door, which opened only from one side thanks to an electric lock system, there was no way out. The only electronic of any kind inside was a large screen set into his wall on the north side of his living room, across from the stiff couch and coffee table on which he now sat. The only thing the screen displayed was the time in bright blue letters.

**09:03**

Just less than an hour until his guest arrived. He could have woken up later, but considering he’d barely slept a wink the night before, he doubted he could have spent a moment longer in bed that morning.

His eyes wondered back to the screen. When he had first arrived, video calls from the warden had been a regular predicament. An alert would sound, some unseen speakers releasing a screeching noise that echoed between his ears long after they had gone silent, and precisely forty-five seconds later her face would appear on the screen. Had Oleana hired her, or had it been someone further down? With so many subsidiaries, keeping track of his toys had always been a difficult task.

She went only by Ms. West, no matter how he might have tried to get a first name out of her. She was a good ten to fifteen years his senior, with silver hair that was always perfectly straight. With makeup, she might have looked younger, but such a triviality might have softened her glare or taken away from the scowl that she always offered him. In a way, Rose couldn’t blame her for her demeanor. Who wouldn’t want the bite the hand that can no longer feed?

Her messages had always been short and direct, on subjects ranging from when his clothes should be ready to be taken away and laundered by staff, to upcoming court dates. But once the trial had ended and the routine of his life had set in, her calls had been sporadic.

Right then, Rose wished for her face to appear on the screen. He would have welcomed her rocky glare if it meant learning who was visiting him today.

It couldn’t have been his lawyer. No matter who he tried to hire, he had been involved in a losing battle. Once the trial had ended, cementing this not-quite penthouse as his new living space for the next few decades, his lawyer had cut all contact. She had her paycheck and a life to return to. Rose had…

Rose had his books, his essays, his screen, and his thoughts.

It could be worse, Rose reminded himself. He had been born now, in a prosperous age, in a world where he could go from a faceless miner to a man the media couldn’t stop following. Had he been born in centuries prior, when one’s fate was practically decided at birth, he would have been lucky to have even been a footnote in history. If he had been born one-thousand years from now…

Even with the disaster over, with Eternatus now the partner and plaything of a child, he could not stop thinking of what lay centuries ahead. Perhaps it was because, despite the numbers that flashed across the screen, time was no longer his ally. That had become clear to him when he’d sat down and calculated just how many days there actually were in his prison sentence.

And who was to say that time didn’t work differently here? Out there he might have been lucky to live another forty years. In here, he might survive centuries.

Rose shook his head. Even he could tell when he was getting ridiculous.

But it still mattered. One-thousand years from now, give or take a decade, the Galar region would be paralyzed in darkness. There would be no energy, and with no energy meant no communication, no research, and no power. It would be the region’s second great nightmare.

By all means, he should not have cared for a time that he would never live to see, an era that would probably be impossible for him to comprehend. He knew that fact, yet he could not shake away the dreams of darkness and silence that blanketed him at night, nor could he push away the worries that had long run through his mind. Surely the people and Pokemon of that time, facing impending tragedy and the shock of an entirely new way of life, would wonder why someone from the past hadn’t tried to halt this disaster.

He sighed. No, one-thousand years from now it would not go down in history that no one had tried to prevent the region from falling apart.

It would simply read that he’d failed.

-

How long had it been since Bede had worn something that wasn’t baby blue and light pink? While he hadn’t taken to the colors at first, time spent with Ms. Opal had certainly influenced his fashion choices. His bathrobe was the soft blue of a card announcing a baby boy’s arrival, while his pajamas were the color of strawberry cotton candy.

Today he wore a buttoned-down white shirt, black khakis, and a coal grey tie. It wasn’t the sort of look that would catch anyone’s gaze on the street, but it was the only thing in his closet that had seemed appropriate.

As he sat on the hard-plastic chair of the waiting room, his hands folded in his lap, he considered what Ms. Opal would do. Keeping secrets from his grandmother was difficult, but by some miracle he had kept this from her. Perhaps it was easy to do when her disapproval would be obvious. She and the Ballonlea gym were both his present and future. Rose and Oleana were nothing but a scab that he should have known better than to pick at.

And yet no matter how many excuses he had tried cooking up, he could never push this idea away. The more he ignored it, the larger it grew, until it ate away at his mind no matter what he was doing. Eating breakfast, training, enjoying afternoon tea, battling a gym challenger - whatever it was, the thought was forever with him. What good was his life if his mind could never be free?

And why leave now, after he’d spent nearly two months working on paperwork and almost twenty minutes getting through security checkpoints? Why leave with his ghosts when an exorcism was now close on the horizon?

That was what kept him in the chair, waiting for the guard to return with the man that had both stitched together and torn apart his life. Yet it did nothing to calm the heart beating rapidly against his rib cage or to dry the sweat that decorated his palms and the back of his neck.

-

How long had it been since he had even thought of the boy? Of all the names Rose had scribbled down, the boy’s had never been one of them.

Rose supposed it might have helped if he could even remember the boy’s name.

He cleared his throat and smiled, in much the same way he did for the warden or the staff that came to his chambers bearing food, clean clothes, or the new books that he had requested.

The boy’s expression did not change. Curly white-blonde hair partially hid his eyes, but it did nothing to disguise his frown. Ms. West would certainly have been proud of it.

“Chair-” The boy cleared his throat. _“Rose.”_

He nodded.

The boy gave him a look over. With no mirror in his bathroom, he could only imagine what he looked like. His hair and beard had always been slow growing, but grooming had hardly crossed his mind in some time. His suit was clean at least. It had arrived the day prior especially for his visit. Though he’d tried asking the staff delivering it if they knew who was visiting him, the man at his door had simply shoved the folded clothes into his hands.

“Is it true that you are a gym leader now?” Some might find it silly for him to ask a question that he already knew, but he’d long since learned that it was an effective way to start out meetings. He pressed his back further against his chair, trying to ignore the stares of the guards standing at the door behind him. If he could just pretend that this was a discussion of stocks or new business ventures, then he might soften the ache between his temples.

“I hardly see how it should matter to you, but yes.”

“I am… I mean, congratulations.” His smile was thinner now.

The boy huffed. “This is hardly what I came to discuss.”

“I imagine so.” Rose gestured towards him. “What did bring you here?”

“Would you believe me if I said I was lonely and needed someone to have a nice chin wag with?”

Just as he would in one of Ms. West’s one-way calls, Rose did not reply.

The boy shook his head. “It’s not because of that.” He rubbed his hands together. “It’s more because…”

Perhaps he paused because he was not sure of what to say. Perhaps it was because he wanted to drag out Rose’s moments of not-freedom even longer. One day Rose might be able to write an essay about this visit, rationalize this experience in the memoirs that no one but he himself might ever read. But right then he would have gladly welcomed back his familiar walls, his books that he finally had time enough at last to read, and even his screaming, endless thoughts, if it meant no longer being here.

-

How long had Bede pondered over the chairman’s motive, trying to construct a rational meaning where there seemingly was none?

“And this tragedy in the future was why you needed so many wishing stars?”

Rose nodded. His hair was greyer now, the wrinkles around his eyes more noticeable. How had he ever all but kissed the man's feet?

“I knew if anyone was going to address it then it would have to be me. Even if it is centuries away, someone had to prevent it.”

“It mattered more than the present, didn’t it?”

“Of course the present mattered!” He sat up, reaching across the table. Bede recoiled back into his own chair before the man could touch him. The guards stepped forward, their Pokeballs held out at the ready. Rose sighed, scooting his chair back and crossing his arms at his waist. “But preventing the Galar region from collapsing mattered as well. It still matters to me.”

Bede shook his head. “You say the present mattered, and maybe you even believe it. But did it really?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

“What about all the people and Pokemon who _would_ have been hurt by a new Darkest Day? What about those who really _were_?” He tightened his fists. “What about me?”

Maybe it was selfish to ask. Maybe Rose was right and whatever role they played now was largely insignificant compared to the tragedy that lay ahead in coming centuries. But after the way his life had gone, with the way the chairman had pushed Bede further into the hole that he’d been born into, didn’t he deserve a chance to be selfish? Hadn’t he earned a moment to matter?

“You… You have to understand.”

“Understand what? That I almost helped you destroy the region? That you might actually have cared about me if I had been born ten centuries from now?”

These were the thoughts that had been eating away at his brain, the ones that Bede had once thought that he could never voice. At this point, Rose’s answers no longer mattered. What mattered was breaking the silence that blanketed him, to release the questions that bit at his tongue. Already, Bede could feel his chains lightening. By the time he returned to the gym, he’d probably be so light that he could probably spend an afternoon exploring the clouds with a flock of Corviknights.

“I see now where things went wrong. I should have been there for you when you needed me.”

“Absobloodylutely!” Bede scoffed. “And I should have realized that I never really needed you. Hindsight is a gift, isn’t it?”

-

How long had it been since Bede had closed the gym, even if just for the morning? He returned to a stream of gym trainers discussing their dentist appointments and morning errands. Sally, one of the older women who trained there, smiled and ran a hand through his hair when he arrived.

“You all right, love?”

He nodded. “I just had a pressing errand.”

Bede could have given much the same answer to Ms. Opal when he saw her that afternoon. Yet something told him to motion for her to come aside.

“Nan, there’s something I need to tell you.” Despite everything that had happened, there was still one more chain holding him down. When it came off, he’d need someone to hold him down lest he blow away. Wherever the wind might take him, whatever that new future might hold, nothing could compare to what, to _who_ , he had now.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I ponder a big bad's motivation and still find myself with a lot of blanks.
> 
> Please excuse my probably terrible attempt at English slang.
> 
> Anyway, congratulations to myself for making my first work of 2020.


End file.
